This week's Stinky Foods star is Hákari, an Icelandic delicacy made of fermented shark. Click through the pages below to learn five weird facts about hakari -- if you dare.
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1. Hákari is traditionally a winter delicacy.
It's enjoyed during a wintertime festival banquet called a þorramatur. The word "hákari" translates directly to "fermented shark" in Icelandic.
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2. Hákari is made from basking shark or Greenland shark.
The fermentation process takes between four and five months, during which time the shark is hung to dry. When fresh, the Greenland shark has too much trimethylamine oxide and urea to eat safely; even after it's processed and is no longer poisonous, it retains an ammonia smell.
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3. Anthony Bourdain is not a fan.
The "No Reservations" host called hákari the "single worst, most disgusting and terrible-tasting thing" he has ever eaten. Even a shot of brennivín, a local spirit typically paired with hákari, isn't enough to prevent many first-timers from gagging.
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4. Hákari is a dish borne out of necessity.
Like many unusual regional foods, hákari is the result of natives finding a way not to waste food. For Icelanders, that meant transforming a once-poisonous animal into an edible -- if malodorous -- foodstuff.
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5. Gordon Ramsay vomited after eating it.
On an episode of his show "The F Word," the cantankerous chef challenged James May to eat hákari, Laotian snake whiskey and a bull penis. May managed to eat all three foods, but Ramsay couldn't keep the hákari down.